NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Free The Free Software!

Photo: Herman Wouters for The New York Times. Armijn Hemel of the Netherlands is part of a movement that wants to make sure that big companies adhere to the rules of open-source software.

via NYTimes, Ping:

The Defenders of Free Software

By ASHLEE VANCE Published: September 25, 2010

ARMIJN HEMEL, 32, lives with his parents in Tiel, a town smack-dab in the middle of the Netherlands. He works as a technology consultant, but spends several hours a week on his avocation: pestering some of the world’s most powerful consumer electronics and technology companies. 

Mr. Hemel serves as a volunteer watchman for free, open-source software like the Linux operating system, which competes with Microsoft’s Windows. The use of free software has exploded, particularly in gadgets as varied as exercise bikes, energy meters and smartphones. Companies like Google, TiVo and Sony often opt to piggyback on the work of others rather than going through the ordeal of building all of the software for their products from scratch.

The problem that Mr. Hemel and others have stumbled upon is that some companies, even some technology savvy ones, may be violating the rather easy-to-follow requirements associated with free software licenses. Typically, these include making tweaked versions of a free software product available to the public, or simply giving credit to the original developers.

Last month, for example, Dell received a public tongue-lashing from the geek kingdom and a cease-and-desist letter courtesy of Mr. Hemel for shipping its new Streak tablet without providing the underlying open-source software code. Dell representatives acknowledged the issue and later put the code on a Web site. “We are committed to fulfilling all of our obligations when using open-source code in our product,” said a Dell spokesman in a company blog.

Mr. Hemel says companies should make sure they know the ins and outs of everything they sell. “If we all play by the rules, we can make some really good stuff,” he says.

Quite often, companies that fail to live up to these requirements do so out of ignorance about the rules of engagement. Nonetheless, they become exposed to potentially expensive lawsuits.

For the moment, companies with open-source compliance issues are in luck. Most of the people, like Mr. Hemel, who prowl about for violations seek neither fortune nor painful retribution. The creators of open-source software tend to just want a modicum of recognition and for companies to do the right thing. “Going to court is not the nice thing to do,” Mr. Hemel says.

Typically, Mr. Hemel, who volunteers for gpl-violations.org, an organization named after a popular open-source license, receives an e-mail complaint from someone who suspects that a product may use open-source software without adhering to the rules. Mr. Hemel will sometimes then hop on his bike, ride to a local retailer, conduct a test purchase and then analyze the product to see whether it uses free software and whether the company selling the product has lived up to its end of the bargain. [...]

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A Call for Copyright Rebellion

 

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via Inside HigherEd:

A Call for Copyright Rebellion

November 6, 2009

— Steve Kolowich

DENVER -- The manner in which copyright law is being applied to academe in the digital age is destructive to the advancement of human knowledge and culture, and higher education is doing nothing about it.

That is what Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard University law professor and renowned open-access advocate, told a theater of higher ed technologists Thursday at the 2009 Educause Conference here. In his talk, Lessig described how digital and Web technology has exploded the conditions under which copyright law had been written.

“If copyright law, at its core, regulates something called ‘copies,’ then in the analog world… many uses of culture were copyright-free,” he explained. “They didn’t trigger copyright law, because no copy was made. But in the digital world, very few uses are copyright-free because in the digital world … all uses produce a copy.”

The paradigm for copyright law enforcement emerged out of this "analog world" as a way of ensuring authors were remunerated for their contributions to culture, thereby creating an incentive to make further contributions and drive the progress on human art and discovery forward, he said.

Times have since changed, said Lessig, but the letter of the law hasn’t.

Copyright law was originally intended to protect those who create for profit (Lessig used the example of recording artist Britney Spears). But academics also create original works, he said, and they are — or should be — motivated by a desire to advance human knowledge, not line their pockets. Therefore, sealing their work behind copyright barriers does no social good.

“If there’s a business model of science, or a business model of education,” Lessig said, “that depends upon sharing, depends upon sharing resources in common and that builds upon that common set of resources — how does the paradigm case help that business model?”

It does to an extent, Lessig allowed. Absolute open access does weaken the incentive to create insofar as scholars crave some tangible remuneration for their commercially published works. The solution to the problem, he said, probably lies in hybrid systems such as Creative Commons, of which he is a board member. Creative Commons licenses allow authors to designate what portions of their work can be copied and how it may be used, thereby avoiding the “thicket” of the copyright system — where, Lessig said, things are never nearly that simple.

Lessig cited several examples of how copyright law in academe has hampered the pursuit of knowledge: neurologists who were unable to aggregate data for a large-scale brain-mapping project due to copyright restrictions; filmmakers who faced staggering costs re-clearing copyrights on images they used in a civil-rights documentary series when they wanted to release it on DVD. He even recounted a recent incident in which he had been using a medical information Web site to try to diagnose his ill daughter, when he noticed a note that said portions of an article he was reading had been redacted under copyright law.

“What we need to do is to act to avoid this thicket,” he said, “at least where it’s clear this thicket doesn’t give us anything good.”

Academics — presumably stakeholders in the effort to advance knowledge — have been uncharacteristically and disturbingly silent on the copyright “insanity” that has befallen the information trade, Lessig said.

“We should see a resistance to imposing the Britney Spears model of copyright upon the scientist or the educator,” he said. “…But if you would expect that, you would be very disappointed by what we see out there in the scientific and and education communities.” Scholars, he said, have allowed the copyright conversation to be steered by lawyers and businesses who are not first and foremost to intellectual discovery.

To them, Lessig delivered a simple message: “Stop it.”

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Lost and Found: A Practical Look at Orphan Works @the NYC Bar Assoc.

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Lost and Found: A Practical Look at Orphan Works


Tuesday, October 20, 2009


6:00 – 8:00 pm

Meeting Hall, New York City Bar Association, 42 West 44th Street


How should the law treat “orphan works”? Please join us as we discuss proposals that would
enable copyrighted works to be used when their owners cannot be located to obtain necessary permissions. What should be the obligations of potential users with respect to searching for copyright owners? How should infringement claims be handled if a copyright owner emerges? Do different types of copyrighted works present unique issues? What roles might registries and recognition and detection technologies play? Our speakers will address these and related questions, focusing on orphan images.

Speakers:
Brendan M. Connell, Jr., Director and Counsel for Administration, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation

Frederic Haber, Vice President and General Counsel, Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.

Eugene H. Mopsik, Executive Director, American Society of Media Photographers

Maria Pallante, Associate Register for Policy & International Affairs, U.S. Copyright Office

Charles Wright, Vice President and Associate General Counsel, Legal and Business Affairs, A&E Television Networks

Moderator:
June M. Besek, Executive Director, Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts

This program is free and open to the public; registration is not required.

Download Flyer: Lost and Found--A Practical Look at Orphan Works

Co-sponsored by the Art Law Committee (Virginia Rutledge, Chair) and the Copyright and Literary Property Committee (Joel L. Hecker, Chair) of the New York City Bar Association, in conjunction with Columbia Law School’s Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts.

Brat of One's Brain? Lewis Hyde on the Google Book Settlement

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via NYTimes:

ESSAY: Advantage Google

By LEWIS HYDE

Published: October 1, 2009

Three hundred years ago, Daniel Defoe offered a memorable image for the relationship between authors and their work: “A Book is the Author’s Property, ’tis the Child of his Inventions, the Brat of his Brain.”

The line comes from an essay Defoe wrote in support of the first-ever copyright act, the 1710 Statute of Anne. That law, one of the great inventions of human civilization, managed to do two good things at once: it gave writers ownership of their work, thus freeing them from patronage, and it limited the term of ownership to 28 years, thus giving the rest of us a public domain, a world of print we all may enter because no one owns it.

Defoe’s metaphor nicely points toward copyright’s public ends: both books and brats grow up; their relationship to those who bore them changes over time. Like a farmer’s children, books must help their author make hay until they come of age, whereupon they are free to leave home and participate in the larger community.

This history has been on my mind recently because it is about to reappear in a courtroom where Judge Denny Chin of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York will very likely hold a hearing later this fall on the proposed settlement of the lawsuit brought by authors and publishers against Google, after Google made digital copies of millions of in-copyright books. The settlement is currently being revised in the wake of objections raised by the Department of Justice and other parties. But whatever form it takes, before he approves it Judge Chin will have to deal with the ghost of Defoe’s parental metaphor, come now to pose a riddle Defoe never had to consider: What shall we do with the orphans?

Orphan works are all those Brats whose copyrights are still active but whose parents cannot be found. There are millions of them out there, and they are gumming up the world of publishing. Suppose a publisher wants to print an anthology of 1930s magazine fiction. Copyright now lasts so long (a century in many cases) that the publisher must assume that there are rights holders for all those stories. Suppose that half the owners can’t be found. What should the publisher do? Its lawyers will advise abandoning the anthology: statutory damages for copyright infringement now stand between $750 and $150,000 per instance.

Less hypothetically, when Carnegie Mellon University tried to digitize a collection of out-of-print books, one of every five turned out to be orphaned. When Cornell tried to post a collection of agricultural monographs online, half were orphans. The United States Holocaust Museum owns millions of pages of archival documents that it can neither publish nor digitize.

Of more than seven million works scanned by Google so far, four to five million appear to be orphaned. If Judge Chin approves the settlement in something close to its current form, the authors and publishers will let Google commercialize these works — sell them, display them online with ads, charge libraries for their use, and more. A portion of the money thus earned will go to Google outright; the rest will go to a new Book Rights Registry, where it will regularly be set aside for five years waiting for absent owners to claim it. At the end of each five-year period, all unclaimed funds will be distributed to the authors and publishers whose works the registry represents.

This is a smart way to untangle the orphan works mess, but it has some serious problems, the most obvious being that it treats orphans as if they were Brats who can be set to work for families who had no hand in their creation. Nothing in the history of copyright can possibly allow for such indenture. In an essay written late in life, James Madison explained that copyright is best viewed as “a compensation for a benefit actually gained to the community.” There were good reasons, he wrote, to give authors a “temporary monopoly” over their work, “but it ought to be temporary” because the long-term goal is to enrich public knowledge, not private persons.

Madison honors the same beneficiaries found in the Statute of Anne, the writer and the rest of us. In no case are third parties meant to profit, as the Google settlement would allow. To let them do so would be like letting an executor drain an estate whose rightful heirs cannot be found....

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Lethem, Others, Reject Proposed Google Book Settlement, Citing Privacy Issues

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via Electronic Frontier Foundation:

September 8th, 2009

National Coalition of Authors Urge Rejection of Google Book Search Deal

Ability to Track Readers Puts Privacy at Risk

New York - A coalition of authors and publishers—including best-sellers Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, and technical author Bruce Schneier—is urging a federal judge to reject the proposed settlement in a lawsuit over Google Book Search, arguing that the sweeping agreement to digitize millions of books ignores critical privacy rights for readers and writers.

The group of more than two dozen authors and publishers, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law (Samuelson clinic), filed an objection to the settlement today. The coalition is concerned that Google’s collection of personal identifying information about users who browse, read, and make purchases online at Google Book Search will chill their readership.

"Google Book Search and other digital book projects will redefine the way people read and research," said Lethem, winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award. "Now is the moment to make sure that Google Book Search is as private as the world of physical books. If future readers know that they are leaving a digital trail for others to follow, they may shy away from important intellectual journeys."

The settlement, currently pending approval from a New York federal district court, would end the legal challenges brought by the Authors' Guild over the Google Book Search project. It would give Google the green light to scan and digitize millions of books and allow users to search for and read those books online. However, Google’s system could monitor what books users search for, how much of the books they read, and how long they spend on various pages. Google could then combine information about readers’ habits and interests with additional information it collects from other Google services, creating a massive "digital dossier" that would be vulnerable to fishing expeditions by law enforcement or civil litigants.

"I believe that the fear of tracking will create a chilling effect on my readers and reduce my readership, and therefore my revenue, from these books," said Schneier, a computer security expert. "Moreover, I write these books in order to participate in the public debate on security issues. Reduced readership negatively impacts my expressive interests as an author."

In the objection filed today, the coalition asks the court to require Google to create a robust privacy policy that gives readers as much privacy in online books as they have in a library or a bookstore and to ensure that the policy is enforceable and overseen by the court on an ongoing basis. The authors and publishers present a list of privacy protections that would improve the settlement, including limiting tracking of users by requiring a court order or judge-approved warrant before disclosure of the information collected, ensuring user control of personal information stored by Google, and making the system transparent to readers. After much pressure from EFF, ACLU, the Samuelson clinic, and others, Google finally issued a privacy policy for Google Books on September 3, 2009. However, that policy doesn’t guarantee that Google will require court approval before disclosing reader information, and it doesn’t sufficiently limit Google’s retention of that information. It is also changeable by Google at any time.

A hearing on the fairness of the proposed Google Book Search settlement is set for October 7, 2009, in New York.

For today's filing:
http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/authorsguild_v_google/File%20Stamped%2...

For more on this case:
http://www.eff.org/cases/authors-guild-v-google